Robert Kagan on the Threat of Antiliberalism

Well, I think that in order for a society to hold together there has to be some sense that we’re in fundamental agreement and the system is intact. There certainly is at least tacit agreement by everyone, at least most of the time, that this is the system that we’re living under. But, of course, historically, there have been times when people have not accepted that. We had a civil war over that very issue. As well as numerous other types of rebellion that didn’t end in civil war, but were clearly a challenge to laws passed or decisions by the Supreme Court, like Brown v. Board of Education, which the South essentially rejected to the point where Eisenhower had to send the 82nd Airborne into Arkansas.

So, in retrospect, because things got patched up, we like to basically feel like we are all in fundamental agreement, but that covers over the fact that one side lost in all of those conflicts. I think it’s a mistake for us to assume that, therefore, the conflicts are over. That’s really the message. It isn’t necessary to be an American citizen to agree to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, and many Americans have not and probably do not today.

Right, and some people, therefore, take the principles themselves to be inherently hypocritical and a lie. I guess what I would say is the lie is that we’re all following those principles, not the principles themselves. This is where I think it’s easy to misunderstand the founders. The founders were not unaware that their own actions, especially in the case of people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who held slaves, were in violation of the very principles that they were advocating. They knew that was true.

So, they were hypocrites in their life, but the principles that they were espousing were not hypocritical. They meant them. In fact, they, in various manners of wishful thinking, hope that slavery would eventually just disappear, although they themselves were not willing to take that step. So, the noble lie, again, may be essential to say that these are all the principles that we are founding our government on, but it is certainly true that there has not always been complete agreement about those principles.

Well, it’s specific to the American experience in the following way, which is first of all, although other governments have subsequently been founded on principles that are the Declaration’s principles, the United States was the first and in a certain sense, the United States is the only nation in the world that does not have a history other than being committed to those principles. Because, of course, the French are now committed to those principles in their government, but they’ve not always been. They were also a monarchy at one time. So that makes the United States unique. The other thing that makes the United States unique, of course, is the problem of slavery – slavery and then the aftermath of slavery, Jim Crow and the fundamental basic discrimination against blacks and others. But particularly blacks, which makes the American experience special.

However, that being said, ever since liberalism was born in the 18th century, there has been a strong antiliberal opposition to it. That was certainly true in Europe, where the battle was fought throughout the 19th century. If you look at Europe before World War II in the fascist era, liberalism was being defeated. I think it’s certainly true that as we look at Europe today and I think you could look elsewhere too, but certainly in Europe, there is a fight going on between liberalism and antiliberalism, which we’re seeing whether it’s with the AfD in Germany or various right-wing groups or the Le Pen people in France. I think they are overtly clear in opposing liberalism in the same way that many Americans do today as well.

Because I think that the problem with illiberalism is it feels like maybe it’s happening by mistake. That people are not sufficiently committed or they’ve gotten lazy. There’s obviously a truth to that. You know, Fareed Zakaria didn’t invent the term, but he certainly made it famous by talking about illiberal democracy and such a phenomenon definitely exists. But I want to make the point that it’s not just that people don’t understand. They really do oppose fundamental liberal principles and I think it’s worth understanding why it makes perfect sense to oppose liberalism depending on what your value system is. You know, liberalism is destructive of all kinds of traditions and hierarchies that people have lived with for millennia. So, it’s quite a challenge to many traditions. A lot of people are made uncomfortable by those challenges to their traditions. and it’s understandable that they are.

I think sometimes people who do believe in liberalism believe that that’s the truth and other people don’t get it. But liberalism is not the truth. It is one perspective on human existence and historically it is a rare perspective on human existence. So, while we live in a world dominated, at least in America, by liberalism, we therefore think it’s the natural evolution of humanity upward toward liberalism. But of course, that’s a creation of our own. It could be that liberalism is a brief lacuna in an otherwise non-liberal world that did exist before 1776 and could well exist at some point in the future.

I would date it to the founding, because as we were talking about earlier, it was clear that American society, although it had adopted these liberal principles as a doctrine, nevertheless, was not behaving in that fashion. America prior to the revolution was not a liberal society and after the revolution it was also not entirely a liberal society. I quote Benjamin Rush, who’s one of the founders and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, saying that ‘We’ve changed our form of government and the principles on which it’s founded, but it’s not clear that we have changed our habits and our way of life.’ That was certainly true because, of course, there was slavery.

Even though the founders had made it very clear that there should be separation of church and state, that religion should not be infused with government, nevertheless, many of the states throughout the 19th century had religious tests for office. You had to be a Protestant or you had to accept Christ or some other way of putting it, but the society clearly was not conforming to what the founders intended and they knew that there was going to be a process of unfolding.

By the way, they knew it was going to go in directions that they weren’t necessarily happy with. I mean, John Adams is saying eventually women are going to be asking for rights. He didn’t think women should have rights, but he knew with the principles they’d laid down that that’s where this was going. So, we have to understand that they did have a sense that how things were at the founding was not how things were going to be in the future if their liberal principles took hold.

There’s a lot of threads that I want to pull on here. First off, I think it’s very different, though, to say that we established liberal principles and we weren’t living up to them. That we were progressing towards that over time. For instance, you brought up Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and we can think of George Washington the same way, they were slaveholders that recognized there was a problem with slavery, but they didn’t quite know how to be able to get out of that institution yet. But they felt that their principles meant that they needed to find a way to resolve that problem or to be able to escape that original sin, if you will. They wanted to move in a liberal direction.

Antiliberalism is saying something different, in my opinion, and it says something different in your book. It’s not that there’s customs that we haven’t broken free of, that we haven’t made society more liberal yet, it’s saying that there’s literally a countervailing force that wants to make things less liberal within the world. That wants to be able to move in an opposite direction. That’s actually pulling things backwards at the same time that liberalism is moving forwards. I mean, that seems to be something that’s very different than just that we’re moving in a liberal direction, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

Well, the reason we haven’t gotten there yet is because there’s resistance to it. I mean, I’m emphasizing the resistance here because I think, again, when things turn out a certain way, we have a way of patching over the fights that led to it turning out that way. For instance, there’s no question that the South, until the Civil War, was overtly and explicitly antiliberal. Leaders like John Calhoun and other Southern leaders said explicitly that they did not agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. They did not agree with the idea of equality of all human beings.

In the 1920s, when the eugenics movement… Something else that we decided to forget from our history was how pervasive the eugenics movement was. It was a very respectable view. They felt and said people who believed in that theory of racial hierarchies was a matter of science. That it was scientifically the case that human beings were not equal. So, there is a constant antiliberal view. If you move into the area of religion, for instance… You know, there is a tension between religion and liberalism. There’s no question about it. In a liberal society, you can hold any views you want to have, but you cannot be sure that your community is going to hold those views, much less the society at large.

Most religions are about all of us agreeing on what God is, what God wants, and what we’re supposed to do. Liberalism cuts against that. So throughout American history, there has been a very powerful desire and belief that America is not a liberal society, but an ethno-religious society. It was a society of white Protestants, that it was founded by white Protestants, for white Protestants, to create a white Protestant society. A very large number of Americans today believe that America was founded as a Christian nation and is a Christian nation. Now, that doesn’t mean we’re heading for civil war, but it does mean that they do reject the fundamental liberal principles of the founding, because a Christian nation is different from a liberal society.

So, in a way, I want to give people credit for their views. Their views are antiliberal. They regard liberalism as a hostile force in their lives whether they acknowledge it openly, whether they would articulate it that way. Some people do articulate it very clearly that way. People like Patrick Deneen, who’s very clear that he’s opposed to liberalism. People talk about a post-liberal movement of conservatives. So, I guess I’m trying to say there’s a tendency to treat people who are not supportive of liberal principles as they’re affected by their economic situation. They feel that they’re not being taken seriously and all these psychological and material factors are clearly at play. But I think we have to take them seriously and say, yes, but they also do not believe that a liberal society is the ideal society.

Let’s pull on this thread a little bit more. I think the antebellum South is the perfect gateway to really think about antiliberalism. It’s easy to imagine that at the founding, we have slavery in America and that we just remain divided between free states and slave states up until the civil war and nothing much changes between them.

But the antebellum South becomes progressively less liberal during this time period up until we get to the civil war. John C. Calhoun is a great example. He didn’t just think that slavery was a necessary evil that you wanted to find a way to get out of. I mean, he thought slavery was an actual good for society. He became somebody who believed very much in the institution of slavery. That’s a huge departure from what we see from previous Southern politicians like Jefferson and Washington and Madison. That’s a shift down the antiliberal spectrum as we get to Calhoun and we see some of the other Southern politicians as we lead up to the Civil War. So, I think as we think of antiliberalism, it really is something that can become progressively less liberal within society if people allow it to do so.

I think the evolution of Southern elite thinking from the time of the revolution, from the time of Jefferson and Washington to the time of Calhoun that you’re talking about is the response to the pressure that they’re under all the way through this period. Because certainly, beginning with the Missouri crisis of 1819, when, for the first time, the northern politicians are saying ‘We are not accepting the further spread of slavery. This is when Jefferson said it awakened him like a fire bell in the night, that the country was fundamentally divided on this basic issue of principle. That’s the way Jefferson saw it. That’s the way John Quincy Adams saw it. That this was a principled dispute.

So, while slavery was not being threatened, it was easy for slaveholders to say, ‘We know this violates the principle, but what do you want us to do? Or we’re working on it. We’ll get back to you.’ But when there is a full-on onslaught of liberal pressure coming ultimately from the federal government, then at a certain point, they say, ‘No, actually, not only is slavery not wrong, it’s actually a positive good and it’s actually good for the blacks that we’re enslaving.’ Whether Calhoun actually believed that or not and sometimes people say they believe all kinds of things because they need to say them. They’re defending themselves from attack. This is a phenomenon that continues beyond the slavery period where the federal government is being more and more under the control of liberalism.

The Founders’ goals are being more and more fleshed out. Society is being conformed more and more to liberal principles and at each stage of that there is pushback. There were people fighting against it. It didn’t end with the Civil War. It didn’t end with the Civil Rights Movement. One of the attributes of liberalism is the belief that everyone will figure it out eventually. There is an assumption that we’ve got to bring these people along. The whole concept of a backlash, by the way, which is being constantly spotted as a backlash against too much liberalism, is eventually they’ll get there. Don’t put too much pressure on them and they’ll get there. I think what we’ve seen, much to our surprise, is that no, they don’t actually get there.

You know, a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the South was still in rebellion against liberal principles. I think that we believe that since the end of Jim Crow, everybody was now down with liberalism. But I think we’ve discovered just as it was a shock to people in the 50s and 60s to see that this antiliberal force was still in place, we’re shocked to find that it’s still in place today. We don’t even want to name it this, but I think that is the continuity. I think there’s real continuity all the way through American history up until now of a significant portion of the public simply not agreeing with the liberal direction of society.

So, we’re kind of dividing the world into liberals and antiliberals as if the tension is between different types of people with different viewpoints, different perspectives. Do you feel that the tension is also within ourselves, that we have a tension between liberalism and antiliberalism within ourselves that is trying to fight over how we actually believe in different views? I mean, we can see it with some of the founders and even within the country itself.

Shortly after the founding, liberalism was really being pushed from states like Virginia where you had the Democratic Republicans fighting against censorship and fighting for free speech through Jefferson and Madison. The Federalists were viewed as far more conservative. They were viewed as being much more in favor of state power, being very hesitant about liberal rights. Things really flipped as we moved into the 19th century. But even if we think back to those Northern Federalists, they still had a lot of liberal views at the same time alongside those antiliberal views. Do you feel like the tension is within ourselves as well as within society at large?

Absolutely, I think that really does get down to fundamental realities of human nature and I think it’s important to understand the degree to which liberalism in some respects is contrary to human nature, because human nature is inherently selfish. Human nature is: I need to take care of myself; I need to take care of my family; I need to take care of my extended family; and I need to take care of people who look like me and believe the way I do. It has never been true in the history of humanity that people have said, yeah, and also those people that I hate over there. They also have all the same rights that I do. So, every person is torn between their own selfish interests and their own tribalism and what are supposed to be universal principles.

That’s where you get into questions of things that are not material, but where the founders talked about things like virtue. Virtue in a liberal society is valuing freedom for everyone as much as you value it for yourself. That is not an easy thing to ask people to do. For instance, one of the things that I talk about in the book and I think this gets to your question about the Federalists in that period, although there is a distinction that sometimes people make, which I want to get into that I think is the wrong way of looking at it. I’ll come back to that.

But yes, look at Italian or Irish immigrants who were at one time treated by the Americans at the time as not being white people and they were denied their rights because they were Catholics or they were not as white as some other white people. They used the tools of liberalism, the institutions of liberalism, the principles of liberalism to gain their equality in society. Then once having gained that equality, they were like, ‘Okay, I’m good. Now I don’t care about liberalism anymore because I don’t need it.’ Every single individual can situate themselves in society and decide that they’re good now. So, the bottom line is, yes, there is a tension in all of us.

But I do want to make a distinction between the dispute between strong government versus weak government. For instance, there’s the inherent dispute between Hamilton and Jefferson at the beginning about how much government involvement in the economy. Those issues get treated as if they are about liberalism versus something else. I think they were all within the realm of liberalism. Those who wanted to have a strong federal government after the Articles of Confederation were concerned about the protection of individual rights because they believe that in the States individual rights were not being protected.

So, it wasn’t as if because you wanted a strong government, therefore you were less liberal. You could be more liberal because you wanted a strong federal government. It was necessary to have a strong federal government to impose the Supreme Court’s decision after Brown. So, liberalism versus its opponents takes a lot of different forms. I’m focusing specifically on protection of individual rights, which to my view is what the core of the founder’s liberalism was about. You can have disagreements about exactly how best to do that.

I guess when I’m thinking of the dispute between Jefferson and Hamilton, I’m focusing exclusively on things like the Alien and Sedition Acts, which was a clear expression of antiliberalism from the Federalists. Now, there’s other aspects where they were more liberal than the Democratic Republicans. They were much more likely to be against slavery, even though that’s a difficult subject to get into in the 18th century because there wasn’t quite an abolitionist movement in the same way as there was in the 19th century.

But to be honest with you, a lot of these figures is more myth than it is reality. I think there’s been a real change in how we think about figures like John Adams since David McCullough wrote his book and a big sea change in how we think about Alexander Hamilton, since Ron Chernow wrote his biography on Hamilton, because I think before we really saw those newer biographies on these figures, there was a sense that we kind of demonized people like Hamilton and Adams and kind of glorified Jefferson in those disputes. I think there’s been a little bit more balance between the two in more recent years.

You know, a lot of the history was written by Democrats in the earlier period and the Democrats liked Jefferson and they didn’t like Hamilton. Then Henry Cabot Lodge loved Hamilton and he hated Jefferson. There’s been a lot of politicization of that, but I think the important thing is that they really were all liberal. Now, you bring up the Alien Sedition Act and I do think we have to make room for the fact that in times of perceived national security crisis, even liberals tend to fall off the wagon a little bit of liberalism. You could look at what Bush and Congress did after 9/11, but you could also look at what Roosevelt did, Franklin Roosevelt and Japanese internment, or you could look at Woodrow Wilson and the treatment of Germans and other antiwar people like Eugene V. Debs.

So, that is a place where the perceived needs of national security unfortunately, have this effect, although it’s usually temporary because it usually is about the immediate moment of crisis that these things happen and then people feel bad for having done them. That’s different from being truly opposed to liberal principles. Again, I just think we need to take seriously that being opposed to liberal principles is a long tradition in American history dating back to the founding.

It is. Obviously, in a democratic system, there is a two-way dynamic between leadership and followership, if you will. I think it’s pretty clear that any politician who strays too far from where the majority of Americans are is not going to be a successful politician. On the other hand, it’s clear that political leadership does push people in a certain direction. So, I think the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt was really important in establishing liberalism as a more dominant force in America than it had been in the 1920s. I don’t think there’s any question about that. But I also believe that more important than that were the circumstances of the time, i. e. the Depression, i. e. World War II. But there’s no question that there’s a dynamic.

But I do think we need to take seriously the views of the masses of people. You know, a part of this is, can you explain Donald Trump without recourse to the people who support Donald Trump? He didn’t just come take a country that was completely liberal, uninterested in anything that he had to say and convince everybody overnight. Obviously, he was tapping into something that exists. I think the thing that he did that even other conservative politicians haven’t done would be to go all the way in tapping into antiliberalism. Conservative presidents are not necessarily antiliberal. In fact, most of them have been pro-liberal. People may not want to hear this, but George W. Bush was what I would call a liberal. He was a liberal conservative.

Trump is an antiliberal conservative. The closest thing to an antiliberal conservative we’ve had as president. You have to go back to the slaveholding South when they had presidents that were supporting them. I think you could see that to some extent, the Republicans in the 1920s that was fundamentally an antiliberal force, but we haven’t seen that since World War II and that’s what makes Trump special. He’s effectively saying, ‘I’m overthrowing this liberal system. I don’t believe in these liberal norms.’ And clearly, the more he says it, the more a very large number of Americans say, ‘Yeah, right. We love it.’ So, it is a dynamic between leadership and existing popular attitudes.

They’re certainly inextricably linked in American history. Whether that’s the European question, I think the European questions are often different and depend on what’s going on in those individual countries. But in the United States, yes. Because you take an existing society where white Protestants are in charge, that was a society that existed before the revolution. The number one enemy at that time are not Blacks, who they don’t take seriously as people, but Catholics. It was a virulently anti-Catholic society, just as Britain was virulently anti-Catholic. So, you start with that, and also you obviously start with the position of white supremacy. It was a country of white supremacy. Liberalism then erodes all that. Liberalism says you have to treat Catholics like they’re equal to us. Liberalism says you have to treat blacks like they’re equal to us.

So, in a sense of just a matter of power, the result of that is that white Protestants, relatively speaking, are losing power and authority to other groups that they despise and think are evil. So, it’s not surprising that there’s a resistance and a backlash and that is what, in fact, we’ve been witnessing for 200 years. In the mid-20th century, sociologists like Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell spoke of what they called status anxiety, and it was white status anxiety. That covers a lot of ground and I don’t know how accurate it is, but it certainly gets to the idea that something is being lost.

That the America that they know is being eroded or being changed by immigrants, by blacks, all of whom are clearly using liberalism to raise their position in society and therefore lower, in a sense, or at least diminish the authority of white Protestants.  So, yeah, they are therefore antiliberal because liberalism is the enemy of their supremacy. Many adjust and say that’s fine. Most Americans have adjusted until recently to that reality, but there’s also a constant resistance. That’s what we’re seeing now really mounting up in a way that we just haven’t seen it since the Second World War.

I think it’s the latter. I think that if you arrive in America and you’re treated like garbage… The Irish were depicted in the Thomas Nast cartoons of the late 19th century as apes. And yet you come in and you have the opportunity to join a political party. You have an opportunity to vote. At that point, because you are marginalized, because you’re despised by the mainstream of society, you are continually pressuring to be treated like an equal. So, yes, you’re using liberalism to make your way in society. Does that mean that you’ve become a true devoted liberal? I don’t know because then, as I say, having accomplished what you set out to accomplish, your descendants are now tempted by an antiliberal leader because liberalism has already taken care of them. They don’t need it anymore.

And by the way, Jefferson talked about this in his Notes on the State of Virginia, which I quote in the book, where he talks about his fear… He’s writing in 1781. There was a tremendous fervor for rights at the time of the revolution. The experience of being oppressed by Britain in the 1760s has a huge impact on Americans’ attitude toward their rights and after the Revolution and also because of the circumstances of what America was, the fact that people could move anywhere they wanted, there was a tremendous focus on rights. So, you could say that the founding was based on an obsession, an unusual obsession, with individual rights.

What Jefferson worried about was that when this is all over and we don’t have the British enemy to point to and it’s just us, we’re not going to be as jealous of our rights as we are during the revolution. Lincoln in 1838 says we have forgotten what this was all about. Of course, the Civil War comes two decades later. So, I think we have seen repeatedly a fading of passion about rights. It is always true that those who feel that their rights are most threatened are the ones who are most determined to support a liberal ideal and the most interested in talking about the principles of the Declaration. Those whose rights are not threatened tend to be less concerned about the question of rights in general.

That’s why the missing link in a way is virtue. That even though you’ve got yours, even though you’re a millionaire, even though you’re a white person and you’ll be fine, even in a dictatorship, nevertheless, you have a true deep belief in liberal principles. Therefore, you’re willing in some sense, also to sacrifice the authority that you might otherwise have in a less liberal society in order to support the principle of liberalism.

I think the degree to which the country has rested on a degree of passion about liberalism that may have faded in our time is something I think not to be ignored. I think you can explain it circumstantially as well. Because, as I say, in the middle of the 20th century, there were all kinds of major factors that had the effect of strengthening liberalism and weakening antiliberalism. But it doesn’t have to last forever, as both Jefferson and Lincoln were concerned.

First of all, that does seem to be a phenomenon, although in fairness, so far, it’s only shown up in polls. I want to see what actually happens in an election. By the way, the Hispanic vote for Republicans was pretty high back in the George W. Bush period. I think he got something between 30 and 40% of the Hispanic vote because he was pro-immigration. He was clearly very liberal when it came to that issue. So, I don’t know how much of this is resilient. We also know, of course, that a certain percentage of Hispanics are very religious, very conservative from a religious point of view, including evangelicals. So, they may be looking at themselves from that perspective, which would, by the way, indicate, and I think this is kind of what you’re hinting at, a certain feeling of acceptance in society.

They’re not panicked about being discriminated against; therefore, they now have the luxury of this. But it’s obviously strange to see that there would be any growth at all. But I want to wait until the vote before I see what happens, because the one thing that I’m very confident about is that the next Trump administration is going to be more infected by white nationalism than the last Trump administration. He didn’t bring anybody into his government that represented Christian nationalist or white nationalist attitudes. But when you listen to the people who are talking about populating his administration, people who are mentioned as likely to populate his administration, you are talking about more White nationalists, Christian nationalists.

And let’s not forget, Trump is the candidate of these people. He made himself the candidate of these people when he decided to run on the birther conspiracy in 2011. That was the signal to all these people who he was. So, I think that once you started seeing how a next Trump administration governs on a lot of issues, for instance, he’s talking about setting up in the Justice Department something to fight anti-Christian bias. Any minority groups that feel that they are all going to be okay under Trump may immediately realize that they’re not and I’m hoping that they understand that.

Look, when 9/11 happened, George W. Bush went out of his way to say that Islam is a peaceful religion and to really push back on the rampant Islamophobia. Do we think that Trump is going to push back on Islamophobia if he’s president? Do we think if there is another cop beating and killing of a black person that he’s going to make sure that those cops are tried and convicted for what they do? We’ve been living in a world where these horrible things happen, but the federal government is pretty clear about where it stands on something like that. I think Trump would take the different view.

So, I think these minority groups are kidding themselves that it doesn’t matter to them whether Trump is elected. They like him for this or they like him for that. But I think they are not seeing what it is they’re walking into.

Let’s take Trump out of the equation. We see antiliberalism in all different parts of the world. I mean, I think of India with Narendra Modi. One of the things that I see with the BJP is the fact that it’s much more inclusive of different forms of Hindus, but is more exclusive of other religions, particularly Muslims. We could see the same thing happening within the United States, where one day antiliberalism could be more inclusive of different racial and ethnic minorities within the country, but increasingly hostile to different religions like Islam, increasingly hostile to people who are considered intellectuals.

It could still be just as antiliberal, just as much looking for enemies, but at the same time, more inclusive of different racial groups. Again, is that something that is progress in terms of becoming less anti liberal or is that perhaps scarier because they’re potentially increasing their potential base of support?

The thing is that we’re in a transition or mixed period here. The fact that there are a number of Catholics who are very pro-Trump and want what they call a Christian commonwealth. What’s interesting to me about that is what happened to the split between Catholicism and Protestantism? I mean, Catholics and Protestants have been killing each other for centuries over doctrinal disputes. So, is that doctrinal dispute not going to be relevant in a quote unquote Christian America. My argument is, insofar as you could even say that that is true, it’s only because of what liberalism has accomplished in America. Liberalism has made it possible for Catholics and Protestants to live together and even to talk about something called a Judeo-Christian tradition, which, by the way, doesn’t exist, but we created it to make everybody feel… It’s part of liberalism’s bringing everybody together.

But if you actually have moved into a post-liberal society, which is what these Catholics like Deneen want, how are they so sure that that old issue doesn’t come up again? I mean, for 150 years, you could not be a Catholic in America and aspire to political leadership. So, is that just gone? In my view, if it’s gone, it’s because of liberalism. If you take away the liberalism, who’s to say that that doesn’t return? I would think the same is true of India. They’ve been living in a liberal society. They’re open minded with regard to Hindus, even though they are extremely prejudicial against Muslims and other religions. But who’s to say that after a decade of non-liberal government, whether the Hindus wouldn’t start figuring out what their problems are with each other either?

We take for granted the degree to which liberalism has softened the edges of all the old disputes that used to roil humanity and lead to war. They have accomplished this in a liberal system. If you take away that liberal system, you might find that people have many disputes. If you are actually going to create a Christian America, there has to be some Christian doctrine behind it.

The question of whose Christian doctrine that’s going to be will be an interesting question. It’s one of the reasons the Founders did what they did about religion. Even at the founding, there were numerous Christian sects, some of whom were worried that if you did have the church in control of the state or the church mingled with the state, it would be Episcopalians running the country, not Baptists, not Methodists. So, I do think that we need to remember that the reason we’re all getting along on these things is because of liberal principles.

Well, I think the fight will be eternal, just because, again, it’s inherent in human nature. Human nature, to some extent, is in tension with liberalism. So, I think you’re always going to have some degree of pushback. However, in the United States, I’m optimistic if we can get past this election, because one thing is pretty clear. One reason you’re having this incredible reaction now, which takes the form of the Trump movement, is precisely because the population of whites, and particularly the population of white Protestants, is diminishing as a proportion of the country. We’re moving toward a majority minority country, and in a certain sense I feel like this might be the last stand of this particular element of antiliberalism, the white Christian element of antiliberalism, because they’re just going to be outnumbered by many diverse groups.

So, in a way the antiliberals of the 1920s when they shut down the immigration in 1924, so they could just have as Trump says, the nice countries coming in, Denmark and Norway and the other Nordics, the problem for them is that they closed the door too late. So many immigrants had come in that the fundamental complexion of the country was changing. That led to a huge burst of liberalism. What we’re dealing with now is the consequence of the 1965 Immigration Reform, which then let in tens of millions of other nonwhite Americans and that has flooded into the country and therefore the complexion of the country has changed.

We’re in an unusual situation where a distinct minority in the country has taken control of one of the political parties for the time being. What happens to the Republican party after Trump has gone? I don’t know. I think it’s in deep trouble. I think it is going to split in some fundamental way, but that is what happened. It’s a little freakish. So, I think that the general trend in America has been toward support for liberalism just by virtue of the fact that there is no majority population to want to hold on to its majority position and its standing in society. So, I’m actually hopeful that we’ll eventually move past this.

Now, that doesn’t mean, as you say, that there’s not going to be a continual challenge. I think the challenge is always going to be there and this is something I think is hard for Americans to accept. Yes, you actually have to fight in every generation, if you want to preserve liberalism. It’s not just going to preserve itself. It’s not just the end of history. It isn’t just the final resting place of humanity – not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a continual struggle.